When you took the job that you have now, did you hope it would make you happy? Did you anticipate having a connection with your coworkers? How about the work itself? Did you imagine yours would be an occupation that would complement your life outside of work and mesh in a way that felt unique and rewarding?
If so, perhaps you’ve been surprised—or even disappointed. While some people are fortunate enough to love what they do for a living, the majority of people with jobs face challenges on a regular basis that undermine their ability to be happy at work.
Hannah is a thirty-two-year-old secretary at a consulting firm where competition, subterfuge, and resentment prevail. She describes the office as a place where “the loudest, most underhanded person wins.”
Peter is a thirty-five-year-old social worker who enjoys helping people get healthy but feels increasingly burned out by the extent of his workload. He’s having a difficult time separating himself from the pain of the people he’s helping and is suffering from an escalating sense of helplessness and hopelessness.
Louise is a forty-year-old police officer who doesn’t know how to separate herself from the aggression her job stirs up inside her. To get through her adrenaline-charged days, she tries to compartmentalize the anger and fear that come with the job, but then finds herself taking it out on her husband and children when she goes home.
Grappling with issues of work and happiness brings up many important questions: Is it possible—or even wise to try—to be happy at jobs we don’t like? Can we really maintain our peace of mind in hectic environments filled with uncertainty? Can we find a skillful way to deal with times when we have tried hard to make a difference, yet feel ineffectual or exhausted? Might the quality of our leadership expand through restoring our own deeper happiness?
The answer to all of the above is yes. There are pragmatic tools at our disposal for becoming more productive, satisfied, and peaceful at work. I believe that foremost among these tools is the practice of meditation. For nearly forty years, I’ve taught techniques of concentration, mindfulness, and compassion meditations to thousands of people around the world. They have included groups of creative entrepreneurs, schoolteachers, police officers, artists, scientists, army chaplains and medics, doctors, nurses, firefighters, frontline workers in domestic violence shelters, as well as financial executives. People using meditation for greater happiness come from every walk of life, ethnic background, and belief tradition.
Through meditation, we can come to understand work problems as a potential source of achieving greater clarity, rather than as obstacles without redeeming value, and begin to recognize the true potential of the challenges that work brings our way. Although many people experience work as a burden, or worse, it is also a place where we can learn and grow and come to be much happier. In the words of teacher and former executive Michael Carroll, “Maybe problems arise at work not as interruptions or intrusions, but as invitations to gain real wisdom.”
Adults who work full time spend more of their waking hours at work than anywhere else, and Americans spend more hours per year at work than citizens of any other nation in the world. It can be difficult to keep from confusing our core sense of ourselves with the role we play at work, but clarity about this is critical to our peace of mind.
How we approach work that’s not always fascinating and manage our time and emotions to counterbalance stress and cope with disappointments is intrinsic to finding meaning in our work world. We discover that it is possible to be competitive without being cruel—and committed without being consumed. Even in a job climate where being fired is a real and present danger, we have the power to improve our work lives immeasurably through awareness, compassion, patience, and ingenuity.
As I listened to people’s stories—students, friends, and researchers on the subject of work—a few common unhappiness themes began to emerge: burnout and the need for greater resilience; time management and excessive hours or demands; questionable moral practices or challenges to personal integrity; feelings of losing a sense of purpose and the need for deeper, more durable meaning; condescension by superiors who do not listen and show a lack of compassion in decision making; boredom, distraction, and ineffectual multitasking due to a lack of concentration; the longing for creativity, surprise, variety, and a more open awareness fostering flexibility and change; and, finally, the desire to understand their work environment from a more open perspective.
These observations are about what is missing for so many, but they help clarify what is needed. They led me to consider the ideas that would begin to resolve those issues, and I identified what I think of as the eight pillars.
Each chapter in this book is named for one of these pillars and concludes with a series of meditations and exercises to try. The meditations are a pragmatic guide to a range of options—it is worth experimenting with them to see what you want to continue with. Even if you are reading a later chapter, you might wish to go back to earlier meditations to reexperience them on a deeper level. By the time you reach the end of the book, you will have an array of tools for cultivating greater stability, openness, and fulfillment while working.
The formal meditations will require ten to twenty minutes of your time; you might find it easiest to choose one or two and practice at home each day. The five Core Meditations found in the early chapters are mindfulness of the breath, identifying emotions, the body and walking, letting go of thoughts, and practicing loving-kindness. Together, these form a complete curriculum for establishing a meditation practice. The other suggested meditations build upon the foundation of these five. Please feel free to experiment with them all, and see what you find most helpful or intriguing or challenging in a way that sparks your interest.
Once you feel confident with the meditations, you can incorporate them into your workday in the form of brief mini-meditations, as well as practicing them at home. The exercises, done either through reflecting or journaling, harness our creative thinking to refine the lessons learned through meditating and help us apply them to our work life. The stealth meditations, found throughout the book, specifically shape our ability to bring mindfulness, concentration, and compassion to our work.
As you explore and develop these eight pillars, may they serve to support you in your quest to establish a deep and abiding experience of real happiness at work.
The Eight Pillars of Happiness in the Workplace
Balance: the ability to differentiate between who you are and what your job is
Concentration: being able to focus without being swayed by distraction
Compassion: being aware of and sympathetic to the humanity of ourselves and others
Resilience: the ability to recover from defeat, frustration, or failure
Communication and Connection: understanding that everything we do and say can further connection or take away from it
Integrity: bringing your deepest ethical values to the workplace
Meaning: infusing the work you do with relevance for your own personal goals
Open Awareness: the ability to see the big picture and not be held back by self-imposed limitations